Nextwave Media - Creative Internet Solutions

Google describes its new +1 button as a way to say “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out”. Much like the “like” button on Facebook which displays your approval for a brand, artist, or product, the Google button will show your “stamp of approval” to your friends and contacts in search results. The feature is intended to “give the right recommendations, at the right time, and in the right format” and users can choose who gets to see their +1’s in their public Google profile. Google hopes that other websites will also jump on board by adding a +1 button. The button is slowly rolling out and it will be a few weeks before every user notices the addition.

More from Google.

All commercial website owners want people to visit their site. Since you’ve gone to the trouble to produce a website, you have probably also made a little effort to learn something about how to get it noticed. In the course of your reading, you will have read about back links, but you may not know exactly what they are. This guide for building back links is intended for people like you.

Once you’ve published your site, you’ll then want to start the process of promoting it using SEO (Search Engine Optimization). You’ll maybe subscribe to newsletters by SEO gurus in hopes of gaining some valuable insights. Like many beginners, some of the best advisers will be useless to you because they use terminology you don’t yet fully understand.

Build Links to Boost Your Search Engine Rankings Introducing Wordtracker’s Link Builder Tool

The surest way to improve your website rankings in the search engines is to get quality links pointing to your site.

With Wordtracker’s powerful new Link Builder tool, you’ll be able to:

• Find hundreds of top quality link prospects
• Uncover your competitors’ linking strategies (and beat them at their own game)
• Analyze sites that rank well for a particular keyword
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• Drive more traffic, sales and revenue for your business

This Link Builder tool offers 7 day free trial (credit card required), a 30 day money back guarantee and the cost is $59 per month, not much if you consider other forms of attracting traffic. And unlike pay-per-click improving your search rankings means you dont have to pay for every visitor delivered to your site. Yes it takes some time and effort but in the long term its a must to not have to rely solely on paying for visitors.
Follow this link to find out more info and/or sign up for the free trial

There has always been some discussion as to whether Google pays any attention to the “keywords” meta tag when ranking web pages. For now, that discussion can be put to rest. Today, Matt Cutts, Google’s page ranking head honcho (he refers to himself as the head of Google’s Webspam team) put out a video and several blog posts that state conclusively that Google disregards the keywords tag.”At least for Google’s web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is no. Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking.”

He notes that the “description” meta tag is used to determine what a page is about, and it is also used as the short summary that is part of a web page listing when it appears in a Google search results page.

Research shows that 44% of US shoppers have already started their Christmas shopping, and the trend looks similar in Australia.

According to data from a Google survey, 44% of US shoppers have already started their Christmas shopping and researching.

Eric Lopez of Google’s retail team also points to the search giant’s own trend data, saying “In taking a look at query volume using Google Insights for Search, we see that search interest in ‘christmas gift’ has upticked sharply over recent weeks, demonstrating this increased research activity.”

A similar query looking at search interest in ‘christmas present’ and related terms in Australia reveals the same trend — though with predictably lower volume and less data available.

Google is reportedly preparing a movie rental service for YouTube, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The service — which would compete with online rental firms like Apple, Amazon and Netflix — is pending closed testing among 10,000 employees. The pilot shall last three months and is currently awaiting the completion of negotiations with Warner Bros., Sony Corp. and Lions Gate Entertainment before kick-off.

Rentals will likely cost $3.99 per film, with studios getting a 70% cut. YouTube will host the titles on the same day as their DVD releases.

An interesting development as Google struggles to montize the online video giant.

I think its a great idea, I know id be happy to pay $4-7 to have a choice of recent releases in the convenience of my own home.

It is important not to overlook paid search engine advertising for your online business. Many of the leading search providers, such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing, offer paid advertising at rates that are affordable to businesses of any size. This is a great way to get targeted visitors to your website which could lead to potential sales. Start an acount with as low as $50. Talk to us today about using this strategy to get qualified traffic to your website.

Here is a quick list of the top 6 pay-per-click advertising mistakes that we’ve seen. I suggest that you print this list and go through it before you start your next pay-per-click campaign.

1. Check for Strange Keywords. You may have accidentally typed-in or pasted an incorrect keyword into your keyword list. Sort keywords alphabetically, skim through the list and make sure you didn’t accidentally miss a space in your keywords or add an incorrect term.
2. Check Destination URLs. This is probably the most common mistake (and also the most costly one). Search engines will continue sending traffic to your site regardless of whether your destination URL works or not. If your campaigns are suddenly not performing like they should, I suggest checking your destination URLs.
3. Copy Negative Keywords. Negative keyword optimization is your best friend in pay-per-click because it greatly reduces paying for clicks that don’t relate to your products. Make sure you copy your negative keywords from one campaign to another before launching the new campaign.

Expanding on a program that enables video viewers to click on ads related to content they’re watching, YouTube’s “click-to-buy” ad program will now be available in Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.

The program launched in October 2008 for the US and United Kingdom. It empowered music labels to capitalize on their content, as well as pirated material, by providing links where users can buy songs featured in music videos on YouTube, for example. Purchasing icons currently include Amazon, iTunes, EMI and Electronic Arts.

In an announcement made Wednesday, YouTube claimed such ads helped boost sales of Monty Python DVDs “23,000%,” pushing the series to No. 2 on Amazon’s list of Movies and TV bestsellers. Monty Python launched a YouTube channel last November, a month after the click-to-buy program launched.

If you are trying to improve your search engine ranking and results, and optimize your site, one of the first things you should look at is the wording of links within your site. This not only applies to your website’s navigation menu, but also any links you have on your site that link to other pages or information. More importantly if you can control how other websites link to you this is essential part of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), make sure you get these incoming links (or backlinks) to use keywords and not just your business name.

Don’t Click Here!

The use of “click here” as the actual link to another page or info on your site will not produce good search engine results and you are wasting an opportuinty to add to your site’s SEO performance if you use this for internal (or external links) on your site.

We’ve had a lot of queries about search engines and how they work lately. There are many ways to get traffic to your website, but for the average small business they probably boil down to only four. These are outlined below simply, and you can always dig deeper later. The four main ways are:

1. Traffic from search engines, known as search engine optimisation or SEO.
2. Traffic from paid search ads, the pay-per-click (or PPC) text ads that appear in e.g. Google.
3. Traffic from other advertising, such as newsletter advertising, e-mails, blogs, direct mail, print advertising, TV ads, radio spots, etc.
4. Traffic from former visitors, e-mail newsletters that keep you in touch with visitors and customers.

The most common mistake Google AdWords advertisers make is assuming that Google’s search network and Google’s content network are the same. In reality, the two are very different. A content network campaign should be set up separately from a search network campaign for a number of reasons: You’ll be reaching your target audience at a different stage of the buying cycle. You’ll be targeting prospects using various types of ads types/formats. Quality of traffic generated through the content network is different. Talk to us today about utilising Adwords in a more effective way.

Earlier this week Google announced that they are launching a new browser called Chrome.The browser will be available in 100 countries and is billed by Google as being a competitor to both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox. The browser will be cross platform working with Windows, Mac and Linux and is the first software release for Linux that Google has released. The developers at Google who have been working on this new browser started with a blank page - looking at what the guys at Google would ideally like a browser to do, having spent so many hours on the internet.

The Chrome browser is aimed at both making the internet easier for user and also to drive innovation on the internet. Designed to be clean and easy to use it’s focussed more on the experience of browsing the web. Their tabbed browsing will run each tab as an isolated instance meaning that if a website crashes the browser won’t shut down as with IE and Firefox, just that one tab. As a result of their user focus Google are aiming to make their browsing experience much faster and user-friendly.

After a period of beta testing Google is rolling out AdSense for Mobile in 13 countries: US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and Japan. Much like AdSense on the desktop, it’s aimed at publishers and site owners and intended to extend Google ad penetration farther into the mobile Internet.

The idea here is that available monetization will encourage mobile friendly site development. There are a number of other mobile ad networks (with more on the way), including Third Screen Media (owned by AOL), Medio’s MobileNow network, Yahoo Mobile Ad Network, Ad Mob, Enpocket (bought today by Nokia), among a few others.

Could your website be easily transferred to a mobile friendly format, would it justify the cost?

In a revamp of its industry-leading Internet search engine, Google Inc. today introduced a “universal search” application that blends video, images, news, books, and local search results.

People searching for “I Have A Dream,” for example, will not only be able to get information about the Rev. Martin Luther King’s famous civil rights speech, but also view a video clip of the speech and scroll through books about King’s speech on Google’s search pages.

“Let’s face it,” said Marissa Mayer, the Google vice president for search results and user experience, when people type ‘big wheels races’ into Google, they want to see some action… They want so see some crashes.”

The new universal search application, meant to drive more traffic to Google products like its YouTube video clips, is the most radical of several innovations rolled out at a press briefing at the company’s headquarters.

Google, confirming reports it had been testing television ad sales, is announcing today it will expand its efforts in the USA with an “automated system for buying, selling, delivering and measuring television ads.”Agencies can upload ads to Google’s system, and then bid auction-style on where the ads will be placed, with different networks, time windows, regions and other categories as options. Google then reports back an aggregate number of interactions and any information about ads being skipped.

Where to next for the media monolith?

As we all learned last week, Google’s efforts to strike content deals with the major media companies, on behalf of their YouTube division, seems to have hit a wall. Viacom pulled all their video clips, NBC accused them of “Mafioso” negotiating tactics, CBS backed off at the 11th hour of deal talks, while Fox and NBC continued to push their vision of launching a big media-backed YouTube competitor.

All such setbacks notwithstanding, it’s still pretty safe to predict that it’s just a matter of time before one of the big media brands caves in and strikes a ground-breaking deal with Google. And maybe not too much longer before Google starts buying programming directly itself.

At the center of such a forthcoming deal will be, of course, money. Specifically, the minimum amount of dollars that Google will guarantee the media company for every year of the deal term. Rumors are that they offered the old media giants as much as $500 million of guaranteed revenues per year, but it wasn’t enough.

By now most people know about Google Adwords, and to a lesser extent Yahoo’s own Contextual Ad service they purchased off Overture.

The problem at the moment is many niches are beginning to show major saturation in contextual advertising. While this is great for the online advertising economy in general, lack of competition is causing price hikes, pushing many of the smaller operators out of the game.

Quigo offers its advertisers the ability to choose which sites their ads are displayed on.

Not all websites are run equally and a top tier site with hundreds of thousands of visitors might be more appropriate than a small blog website depending on the product or service offered.

The key though is choice, which is very important when you want to fine tune your results even more than Google and Yahoo allow, particularly when dealing with gargantuan budgets from the big players.

This two page Google Cheat Sheet lists all Google services and tools as well as background information. The Cheat Sheet offers a great reference to grasp of basic to advance Google query building concepts and ideas.

Download it here (PDF file)

The two pages of Google Cheat Sheets cover:-

• A list of all Google domains
• Company information
  
  • Founded Date
  • Key People
  • Revenue
  • Employees
  • Contact Address
  • Contact Phone & Fax
• PageRank
  
  • Googlebot 2.1 Addresses
  • List of sites with PageRank 10
  • PageRank formula
• Google Form Elements
• Google Services
• Query structure to access directory listings of:-
  
  • Music files
  • Movie files
• List of basic Google Calculator operators
• List of advanced Google Search operators
• List of Google Investments
• List of fun Google services and tools
• List of 15 official Google Blogs
• Google Calculator examples

I read an article today talking about Google finally offering a version of their many office productivity tools as a paid service to businesses.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_07/b4021070.htm

People have been speculating about this sort of stuff for a while now, and since most of us have experienced web applications ourselves we have no doubt this is the direct a lot of productivity tools will go.

Microsoft has also produced a similar product called Office Live.

I think all of these types of products are going to move to online subscription based models in the near future; and this could finally lead to the death of upgrade software and licensing.

One thing Microsoft can certainly do with is some healthy competition on the Office front. I know most people find that their software is over complicated and bulky.

Here is an interesting insight into what Google’s plans are for Australia.

http://www.abc.net.au/insidebusiness/content/2006/s1797620.htm

It’s also interesting that business analysts may not see Google in the same way that Google sees itself.

A research note by CitiGroup analyst suggests that Google will become the highest-trafficked site on the planet a year from now. Mark Mahaney based his advice to the investors on September 2006 data from ComScore showing Yahoo! receiving 129,724,000 million unique visitors over that month and Google ranking 4th with 107,365,000 unique visitors. So “Mahaney notes its unique visitors are up 22% from last year, by far the biggest gainer among the Web sites. Using the present growth rates of the top 20 Web properties as a guide, Mahaney says Google will become the top Internet destination in late 2007.” For the record, on the European continent Google sites are already ranked at #1, ahead of Microsoft/MSN, Yahoo! and eBay.

It looks like Google and Yahoo! have gotten together to encourage an open standard for sitemap descriptor files for use by Webmasters to notify Search Engines of changes to their website.

A video interview on WebProNews.com explains in detail:
http://videos.webpronews.com/index.php/2006/11/16/yahoo-and-google-collaborate-on-search/
The site: sitemaps.org, explains some of the frequently asked questions as well as a detailed description of the format.

There are tools already that allow users to create these sitemaps for Googles Sitemap system, unless there are any major changes to the open format it would be safe to assume these tools will work for future submissions.

If you have a new site, or a site that you update frequently with dynamic urls, these sitemaps can be a great tool to tell the Search Engines exactly which pages they should be looking at.

All in all, its nothing too big, but certainly a great step forwards in regards to co-operation between the Search Engine giants.

This may be old new for some but as I signed up for, yet another, adwords account I was greeted with new welcome page. Looks like Google is heading into the world of the dashboard.

Adwords will be adding alerts & announcements - nothing too new here BUT I hope the space will be used to give quicker action to high level problems, less a space for more marketing messaging. Right the preferences are the same as they have always been - no changes. Would be interesting if they started giving alerts for ‘abnormal’ traffic patterns and/or having alerts sent to your cell phone…

They also have added a block (bottom right) for what I assume with be ajax graphing. Pretty cute.

Go ahead and try it out - it apparently works on any account (tried on my all my others) at ‘adwords.google.com/select/snapshot’